1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to a slot-in optical drive, and more particularly to an apparatus for determining and guiding discs of different sizes to be loaded and ejected in a slot-in disk drive device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typical disk drive devices may be mainly classified into a tray type disk drive device and a slot-in disk drive device. The tray type disk drive device has a tray for supporting a disc, and the tray is pushed into or slides out of the disk drive device so that the disc reaches a specific position or is ejected. The disc only has to be directly inserted into an inlet of the slot-in disk drive device, and the loading/ejecting mechanism can automatically suck the disc in and guide the disc to the positioning position in a convenient manner. In addition, no tray is needed, and the device can be thinned more easily.
However, discs of different sizes cannot be embedded with a spindle motor for rotating the disc correctly until the disc reach a playing position in the disk drive device without error, or otherwise the optical disc is jammed in the disk drive device. Thus, the device tends to have an error, or even the disc and the disk drive device tend to be damaged. Multiple sliding plates, guiding rods and bar-linkage mechanisms are utilized to guide the discs of different sizes for positioning and loading/ejecting in prior arts. However, the guiding rod and the bar-linkage mechanism have to successively guide the disc to be aligned with the spindle motor, and the loading/ejecting mechanism is too complicated. Also, the disc cannot be always kept horizontal via the peripheral point contacting to guide the disc. Thus, when the foreign object or disc is being loaded, other switches corresponding to other sizes of discs may be touched and the determination error of the disc size may occur to cause the malfunction of the transmission mechanism and thus to cause the disk drive device to have the error. Thus, the conventional apparatus and method of the slot-in disk drive device for loading and ejecting the disc still have problems to be solved.
The invention will become apparent from the following detailed description of the preferred but non-limiting embodiments. The following description is made with reference to the accompanying drawings.